This thesis is a study of the British writer Anna Kavan (1901-1968). It begins by tracing Kavan’s life and examining the mythologies around her radical selfreinvention (in adopting the name of her own fictional character), madness and drug addiction. It attempts to map a place for her previously neglected work in twentieth-century women’s writing and criticism. Close reading of Kavan’s fiction attends to her uses of narrative voice in representing a divided self. Given Kavan’s treatment by the Swiss existential psychiatrist Ludwig Binswanger, the thesis explores connections between her writing and the British anti-psychiatry movement, especially R D Laing. Focussing primarily on the Modernist and Postmodern aspects of Kavan’s work, it also notes Gothic and Romantic inflections in her writing, establishing thematic continuity with her early Helen Ferguson novels. The first chapter looks at Kavan’s first collection of stories, Asylum Piece (1940) and her experimental novel, Sleep Has His House (1947). It reads her portrait of institutionalization as a nascent critique of asylum treatment, and considers Anaïs Nin’s longstanding interest in her work. Chapter Two draws on research into Kavan’s experiences during the Second World War, particularly her time working with soldiers in a military psychiatric hospital. Reading her second collection of stories I Am Lazarus (1945) as Blitz writing, it connects her fiction with her Horizon article ‘The Case of Bill Williams’ (1944) and explores the pacifist and anarchistic views in her writing. The third chapter, a reading of the novel Who Are You? (1963), argues that Kavan engages with existential philosophy in this text and explores parallels with Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea. The final chapter looks at Kavan’s last and best known work, Ice (1967). Following Doris Lessing, this chapter reads the novel’s sadism as a political response to the Second World War. Contesting critical interpretations which have pathologized Kavan’s fiction as solipsistic representations of her own experiences, this thesis aims to resituate her as a politically-engaged writer of her time.

This thesis is a seminal in-depth study of how non-indigenous writers and illustrators construct Aboriginal childhood in children's fiction from 1841-1998 and focuses not only on what these say about Aboriginal childhood but also what they neglect to say, what they gloss over and what they elide. This study probes not only the construction of aboriginal childhood in children's fiction, but explores the slippage between the lived and imagined experiences which inform the textual and illustrative images of non-Aboriginal writers. This study further contends that neo-colonial variations on the themes informing these images remain part of Australian children's fiction. Aboriginal childhood has played a limited but telling role in Australian children's literature. The very lack of attention to Aboriginal children in Australian children's fiction - white silence - is resonant with denial and self-justification. Although it concentrates on constructions of aboriginal childhood in white Australian children's fiction, this study highlights the role that racial imagery can play in any society, past or present by securing the unwitting allegiance of the young to values and institutions threatened by the forces of change. By examining the image of the Other through four broad thematic bands or myths - the Aboriginal child as the primitive; the identification of the marginalised and as the assimilated and noting the essential similarities that circulate among the chosen texts, this study attempts to reveal how pervasive and controlling the logic of racial and national superiority continues to be. By exploring the dissemination of images of Aboriginal childhood in this way, this study argues that long-lived distortions and misconceptions will become clearer / Doctor of Philosophy (Literature)

This thesis discusses the poetry of the Argentine writer, Alfonsina Storni, in relation to the particular context in which she was writing. Specific bases for interpretation are set out; they include a consideration of gender topics and other relevant political and cultural issues. As Storni's work addresses a range of concerns regarding the social construction of the female body, a method of reading is required that deploys an understanding of the body as both physical and socio-cultural, allowing all of the major aspects to be treated. The type of analysis applied, corporal criticism, is often found within the social sciences but rarely employed within literature; the following study demonstrates that it is highly applicable to this field, particularly in the case of women writers, or other marginalised groups. The thesis consists of two parts; the first is an exploration of constructions of the body within various forms of discourse in early twentieth-century Argentina: institutional, popular and erudite. I document a variety of negative stereotypes, and then look at those discursive forces (such as journalism and popular theatre) which were able to oppose the restrictions imposed on women. I then examine how Storni made use of these as strategies of resistance, focusing on language and audience-reception. The second half of the thesis provides an in-depth study of the texts, tracing a clear line of literary development throughout Storni's work on both formal and thematic levels. By identifying those aspects of the poetry that can be considered innovative in relation to conventional definitions of gender and / or genre, I aim to suggest new ways of reading her work. In the conclusion, I examine the relationship between the poetry discussed and the work of contemporary women poets in Argentina, offering insights into the role of Storni's work within the larger context of Latin American poetry.

This inquiry explores how eight young francophone scientists within anglophone and francophone postsecondary institutions in Montreal and Paris developed academic literacies in English and French, and constructed identities as members of national, linguistic, academic, and socio-cultural groups. I define literacy development as an individual's development of writing competencies and appropriation of language and social practices in and around written texts within specific socio-cultural, interactional, and discursive contexts. I adopt a socio-cultural, hermeneutic approach to literacy and identity to propose an integrated model of academic biliteracy development and identity construction inspired by Bakhtin, Halliday, Ricoeur, Taylor, and Vygotsky. To understand how the participants engaged in academic literacy practices and constructed identities in their academic writing, I conducted 50 hours of autobiographical and text-based interviews about their writing, life plans and experiences, and sense of self as writers and learners, over three years. I also paid visits to the participants' homes and workplaces, and collected documents such as legal texts, university statutes, and national census data so as to situate the participants' texts and experiences within their autobiographical, institutional, historical, and societal contexts. Through selected excerpts from interviews, documents, and writing samples, I argue that the participants' academic biliteracy development and identity construction was shaped by their individual evaluative responses to social forces. I suggest the shared individual and collective responsibilities of scientists, language specialists, academic gate keepers, universities, and governments for the advancement of academic literacies in more than one language. I draw implications of this inquiry for academic biliteracy, instruction and research in bilingual academic writing, and the theoretization of writers' identiti

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This essay uses feminist theory to examine whether the female narrator in Joanna Russ science fiction novel We who are about to… can be viewed as a personification of women’s struggle against an oppressive male society. The thesis of the essay is that the female narrator’s struggle against the male oppressors in the novel represents the struggle for women’s rights in Western society. The essay will also examine if teaching feminist theory and including women science fiction writers in the classroom will promote gender equality and thus fulfil the requirements of the Swedish curriculum.

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This study sets John Milton’s Paradise Lost in dialogue with Lucy Hutchinson’s Order and Disorder, concentrating on each poem’s portrayal of the Christian redemption narrative as interpreted through typology. Specifically, I focus on the absence of a positive feminine type in Books 11 and 12 of Paradise Lost and relocate it in Order and Disorder in the characters, Sarah and Rebecca. In regard to typology, Milton adheres to a traditional typology steeped in patriarchy, which devalues women’s participation, whereas Hutchinson recognizes both paternal and maternal types. Furthermore, Hutchinson views Sarah and Rebecca as vital to the redemption narrative and shapes them as types for Mary, therefore making an original contribution to typology. This study concludes with a reading of Hutchinson’s use of typology through twentieth-century contemporary feminist theology and suggests that Hutchinson’s role as theologian challenges that of Milton’s.

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